Thursday, March 25, 2010

When working in slim and using an auto maya shading group > slim script, slim will generate a graph layout for every node. For me, I like to work with a single graph layout, like in Shake. You could delete the layouts one by one, or you can read on, it'll be slightly different what with all the different pipelines.
Here's my workflow,
1. reference the rigging file
2. save as rig.ma
3. export the maya shaders into slim, it'll generate all the necessary connections, textures > diffuse > delux > ensemble, and a billion layouts.
4. in slim, select all your nodes, thus grouping all the nodes into one graph, and rename the graph to "all"
5. export your slim palette, our company has an auto export script which will export the palette, the attach mel, the meta file, and the aov all at once. If not, you'll have to manually do this part.
6. find your palette, open with text editor, search for layouts, it look something like this,
graphlayouts {
layout Diffuse_layout {
arrangemethod auto
roots 1400_DXwEjq30000
traversemethod upstream
scroll {{} {}}
transforms {1 {0 0}}
}
7. delete all the layouts between graphlayout {} except the one you made, "all".
8. save. open rig.ma, attach the palette.